Africa-Press – Angola. Characterized as a region of weak economic and social development, the city of Luena, capital of the province of Moxico, still registers shy investment from the private sector, which compromises the rapid growth of the district and the improvement of life of its citizens.
The region, which recently celebrated 67 years since its elevation to the status of city, has registered growth in terms of geographic expansion and implementation of social infrastructures, but it is still far short of meeting the expectations of the population.
Luena is one of the most separated provincial cities from the Angolan capital (Luanda), by more than 1,200 kilometers by road, surpassed only by Ondjiva, capital of the province of Cunene, which is 1,300 kilometers from the largest economic center in the country.
This distancing has impeded the socio-economic growth of the region, given the difficulty faced by operators in transporting goods, fundamentally caused by the deterioration of the National Road (EN180), currently under construction, which connects Luanda to the east of the country.
Since peace was won in 2002, the city has benefited from the Public Investment Programs (PIP), the Integrated Program for Local Development and the Fight against Poverty (PIDLCP), and more recently the Integrated Plan for Intervention in Municipalities (PIIM), which has cherished the dreams and hopes of the approximately 400,000 local inhabitants.
The region saw improvements in the road network, especially in the last year, the requalification of several neighborhoods and the enlargement of the city, with the asphalting work of 12.5 kilometers, within the framework of the implementation of the PIIM.
In this period, there were also improvements in the water distribution program, public and domestic lighting, environmental preservation, especially with the creation of green spaces, construction of more classrooms and health units, in addition to commercial establishments.
These are, therefore, state investments that are hardly complemented by the private sector, which offers good business opportunities, particularly in the field of tourism.
The province of Moxico has 780 rooms, the result of seven hotels, five inns, 17 pensions and 25 leisure and cultural establishments, mostly concentrated in the city of Luena.
The region is rich in tourist attractions, such as the mythical lagoons of Mulondola, located in the commune of Lucusse, 142 km from Luena, and from Sacassanje, which offer stunning beauty to visitors, in addition to the Monument to Peace built in the “heart” of Luena , the symbol of concord between Angolans.
Self-construction accelerates urban expansion
Despite the high demand registered in the real estate sector, mainly for the youth fringe, the bet on self-construction, by the citizens, has been the “salvation” for the reduction of the housing deficit.
This has contributed to the emergence of new neighborhoods and expansion of the city of Luena and, consequently, of the main municipality (Moxico), which has three communes: Lucusse, Cangumbe, Muangai, 15 regedorias, and 293 subdivisions, including neighborhoods, villages and settlements.
The initiatives of self-construction, in many cases in a disorderly way, without the proper monitoring of the administrative authorities, join the initiatives of the Government, which built a centrality with 425 apartments and an urbanization with 450 houses, in the 4 de Fevereiro neighbourhood.
These houses, built with public funds, made it possible to house five thousand families in the city, mainly the youth group.
Expansion of the water distribution network
In terms of water distribution, Luena has a low distribution rate, around 31 percent, and is benefiting from the implementation of the Institutional Development Program for the Water Sector (PDISA I and II).
The program is expected to expand to 17,500 inhabitants of the periphery by 2024, raising the distribution rate to 70 percent.
In the energy sector, the region has made considerable progress, with two thermal power plants that produce 27.5 MW, as well as 12 MW from the Chihumbwé hydroelectric plant, installed in the municipality of Dala (Lunda Sul).
Within a year, the city of Luena will see an increase in energy distribution capacity, with the entry into operation of a Solar Energy Park with a capacity of 26,906 megawatts, whose construction is over 70 percent.
In the field of Education, the city of Luena has a small number of schools to accommodate 27,000 children who are outside the normal education system, lacking 74 primary schools.
The region, inhabited by 454,409 people, mostly children, has 91 primary schools, which allowed the enrollment of 105,125 primary education students, instructed by 1,913 teachers.
architectural rescue
Meanwhile, despite weak investment from the private sector, Luena is currently experiencing a metamorphosis, also in its architecture.
When it was conceived (at the time Vila Luso), in 1922, the geometry of the city was already based on the perspective of modern and contemporary architecture, preserving non-renewable resources and ensuring environmental quality for 50,000 inhabitants.
With a model based on a futuristic and dynamic city, Luena confuses the interpretations of the main architectural concepts, taking into account that its urban model resembles the binomial economic city/social district, however, its matrix, the landscape, services and layouts, make it modern and reassume the concept of city.
With many urban similarities between the cities built along the 1,300 km of the Benguela Railway (CFB)-Benguela/Huambo/Cuito (Bié), the expansion of Luena was defined urbanistically through layouts developed towards the south of the line.
Preserved and modernized to this day, the CFB railway station was an important reference in the urban structure, conceived through a square foundation, where a square is located, from which the hierarchical network of streets and squares was created. .
According to historians, it was the governor of the District (province) of Moxico, D. António de Almeida, who chose, designed and founded, about 20 kilometers north of Moxico Velho (former provincial seat), the new seat of the district, designated through Moxico Novo (today Luena), on a 12 km wide plateau that spreads between the Luena rivers, to the south, and the Lumege, to the north, at 1,350 meters above sea level.
D. António de Almeida’s intention, according to reports, was to place the new settlement (formerly Luso, currently Luena) next to the CFB line (which arrived in that area in 1913 and the border with Northern Rhodesia – present-day Zambia – in 1929), starting to be connected to the other villages through which the line passed – Cuito (Bié), Huambo and Benguela.
In 1922, this village would change its name to Vila Luso, after a visit by the High Commissioner of Angola, General Norton de Matos. In the village, a neighborhood was built for the installation of railway employees, the Ferrovia or Compão neighborhood, located to the north of the CFB.
Still under the name of Luso, the town was transferred to the city on 18 May 1956. Its position, linked to the only railway line that crosses the entire Angolan territory, made it a strategic commercial, political and economic point. administrative.
Expansion of the city: II Urbanistic Plan
Conceived to become a Garden City and, with that, touristic, given the geographic position that made it the last modern region, at the time, to reach Africa, via the Congo Railway, it was elaborated, in 1959, o II an Urbanization Plan for Luso (PUL).
Made to reinforce the existing structure, the Luso Urbanization Plan established new areas for expansion and created new equipment and green spaces.
With the historic center consisting of the first houses, counting those on the 1st street, built on Avenida 1o de Maio, on the 4th street, whose main reference is the Hotel Luena (formerly Luso Hotel), the urban neighborhood of Saydi-Mingas, modern single-family homes and public buildings, gardens and wide avenues.
According to local historians, the Benguela Railway Station and the Luena Airport are two infrastructures that represent the development and importance achieved by this city in the east of Angola.
It was a plan by the architect Sabino Correia that gave an urban meaning to the first ten blocks that made up the city, between 1960-1961, starting from pre-existing conditions, adding squares, streets and hierarchizing public spaces and buildings.
Immediate Occupancy Plan
A kind of III Luso Urban Plan took place in 1973, when what became known as the Plan for Immediate Occupation Zones, by the architect Adérito de Barros, was drawn up, which foresaw expansion to the south, in the lower zone, towards the Luena river, and the Alta zone, which would lead to Cidade Alta or Alto Luena.
At that time, the city of Luso contained qualified buildings, with modern architecture, or following the so-called “Estado Novo style”, already with the incorporation of the Post Office building, the Palaces of Commerce (current headquarters of the MPLA) and of the District Government (Provincial Government).
The Palácio do Comércio, seat of the Commercial Association since 1952, built to the east of the city, close to the Igreja Matriz and Sé Catedral do Luso, would temporarily become the headquarters of the District Government and would later be expanded, by subsidy from the governor -general and, after the construction of another floor, in 1954, it would absorb the Chamber and the Court.
Currently undergoing restoration work, in front of the building, the wide hipped roof and eaves still remain, marked by the central and symmetrical portico of the façade.
Opposite the building was Jardim Salazar, until the new palace of the District Government and City Council, on the west side of the city, was completed in 1965. This building is currently the seat of the Angolan Provincial Government. As for the Palácio do Comércio, it was restored in 2007 and is now the headquarters of the MPLA in the city.
tumultuous recovery
The growth of harmful human action, especially in the post-peace period, reached on April 4, 2002, precipitated significant advances in the famous Ravina do Aço, aggravated by the incessant rains that fall in the region, destroying houses in the surrounding areas.
This forced the government to build the first social houses in the popular Bairro Popular, in a total of 10 residences.
Built in a quick time, until then the government seemed to be committed to following the Colonial Plan for the Expansion of the city (PUL), through pre-existing anthropological, geological and topographical studies, which recommended the continuity of the construction of the city to the West of Luena, in the continuity of the Sangondo neighborhood, and to the south, with a view to building the city of Alta do Luena, or Alto Luena, similar to what Huambo is today.
With the need to accommodate the provincial staff, the first housing project was born, “provincially” known as the 20 houses projects. It was then the beginning of the contradiction of the city’s architecture, when these houses were built close to the Railway Line, with unattractive landscape and environmental requirements and far from the desired urbanization.
The population still has memories of an unbridled occupation of land in inappropriate places, especially in the extreme west of Luena, without the minimum of basic principles of urbanization for the promotion of the much-claimed self-directed construction, under the watchful eye of administrative and governmental authorities.
In the eagerness to realize their own homes and the passivity of the competent authorities, the Municipal Administration “lost power” over the population and expanded, in the beginning, the Social Youth neighborhood, an unfinished initiative of the Central Government that had built 100 houses for young people, within the framework of the “deceased” Angola-Jovem programme.
The aforementioned project, yet another one that did not comply with the Colonial Urban Plan, which would give continuity to Sangondo or Alto Luena, as there were already streets and even colonial curbs, would become the III mini Housing Project in the post-independence period.
Since then, other “megaloprojects” have been built, such as the Centralidade do Luena Heróis de Cangamba, for more than two thousand people, and the housing project for 450 houses, definitively changing the logic of the defined landmarks of the city’s expansion.
The centrality Heróis de Cangamba, a model replicated in at least seven cities in Angola, is modern, “compliant”, with basic concepts of basic sanitation, given the attention given to the construction of macro drainage and other structuring equipment, but it was like abandoning the “ old” and embraced the “new”.
The structure is typically Portuguese, but far from following the characteristic architecture, even engineering, used in the now old city of Luena.
As for the other peripheral neighborhoods, they grew in a disorderly and uncontrolled way, without basic sanitation principles, going from a city of 50 thousand to a million inhabitants, constituting concrete examples of “de-urbanization” and practices of extinction of the historical structure and architecture of the city of Luena, the Garden and Tourist City.
Aware of these phenomena, and with the aim of preventing any clamorous, environmental, public health, social integration and mobility consequences, the Municipal Administration of Moxico began a hesitant and “timid” Urban Plan for the Reserve in the Kanda region, five kilometers north of Luena, along the EN180.
It is hoped that the plan, covering 131 hectares, with a total of 814 lots for an estimated population of four thousand inhabitants, will be feasible to save Luena, which completed 67 years of existence on May 18, elevated to the category of city in 1956.
It will also be essential to materialize at least two more plans: the recovery and maintenance of the old town of Luena, as a historic city, avoiding, for example, the saturation of macro drainage and collapse of buildings, and the urban reorganization plan peripheral neighborhoods that grew in a disorganized and uncontrolled way.
Further efforts are needed so that, in fact, Luena rescues its enviable architectural matrix, a Master Plan for the City of Luena being drawn up for the moment, based on the principle of respect for the maintenance of pre-existing structures, given their historical importance, and create sustainable projects with basic elements for the development of a futuristic city.
With the elaboration and implementation of a Master Plan, one can easily escape from the current governance pattern characterized by improvisations, a kind of “firefighter government”, and, definitively and finally, observe the evolution of a proactive administrative management, with the subdivision of land, territorial organization, definition of the model of structures to be erected, urban planning and other urgent valences.
Angop
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